


sunlight.

by teasoni



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Fluff, Multi, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 09:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13455780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teasoni/pseuds/teasoni
Summary: The most beautiful sight, James thought, was that of the sunlight against Shepard’s spine. It was, he knew, oddly specific, and hardly something he’d ever have expected to find beautiful, and yet hedid, almost impossibly so.





	sunlight.

i.

 

The most beautiful sight, James thought, was that of the sunlight against Shepard’s spine. It was, he knew, oddly specific, and hardly something he’d ever have expected to find beautiful, and yet he _did_ , almost impossibly so.

He’d first noticed it before the galaxy ended, before they were all thrown into chaos, before blood became all James could see and taste and touch, before Shepard’s careful healing was unravelled until she was nothing more than raw power and fury. Before, when they lay sprawled across the bed in her Vancouver apartment after having made love for hours and hours; they’d wake bathed in the light of the late summer sun, warm and with hearts not quite as fractured as they had been beforehand. James would touch her. Small touches, a finger along her spine, tracing the strong muscles of her back. And she would smile, how she would smile, stretching out like a cat before lapsing back into a dreamless sleep that only his company could give her.

Shepard was sorrow; she was pain and fear and grief, and yet she was love, true and unadulterated love that had the tendency to overwhelm her at times. It didn’t matter what kind of love it was: romantic, platonic, motherly. It was all the same to her. And she loved him, too, even though he had come to her as a jailor. For James - who had come to her rarely having been loved before - the sheer magnitude of it overwhelmed him just as much, and he would find himself craving her in ways he’d never craved anybody before, in ways that no rigorous military discipline could control. She loved, and by doing so emitted her own light and her own warmth that James would dream about night after night. So he would go to her, and she would hold him amidst the soft cotton folds of her sheets, and everything in the world would be right again.

 

ii.

 

There was no sunlight in space. There were, of course, many suns, but they never quite captured the buttery warmth of Sol, and never quite offered the same comfort. The blue suns were frosty and filled the _Normandy_ with a strange grey light that consumed every corner and crevice. The red suns were too violent and overwhelmed the ship with fire that couldn’t be extinguished. Shepard would wake screaming in the light of the red suns, convinced that the _Normandy_ had been engulfed by flames, and that everything had been reduced to ash.

But, sometimes, they passed through systems where it was almost the same as Sol. There was a particular system, somewhere in the Perseus Vale, that struck all the humans aboard the ship with a sudden sense of homesickness; it was nearly violent in its nature, instilling the _Normandy_ with a stifling hush until they passed beyond the sun’s reach.

During that time the _Normandy_ had been filled with Earth-like sunlight, as though it was docked planetside, and all the human crew members couldn’t help but feel a little more at peace. The pressurisation filled the decks with a constant rush of oxygen that sounded vaguely reminiscent of the sea, and sometimes Shepard would lie on her back, closing her eyes to see if she could trick herself into thinking she was lying by the sea. Sometimes it worked, but most times it didn’t, and she rose with little more than a heart aching for a home she wasn’t sure she’d ever see again.

James felt similarly; after all, he’d grown up by the ocean, and the _Normandy’s_ endless crawl through the system - past that enormous, blazing star - pulled at his heartstrings in ways he couldn’t explain.

He went to Shepard and found her lying on her belly, eyes closed, breathing softly, her body swathed in golden light. Something hard lodged in his throat, then, closing it so tight he couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t help but reach out and touch her. It was feather-light, just by her ankle, where the sunlight hit perfectly and cast a deep shadow along the line of her calf. Shepard woke at the contact and rolled over, and with a stuttering heart James realised she was entirely naked. She looked at him, smiled, and he crawled to her like a sailor to a siren’s call. But she was no siren, he knew - she was a woman consumed by grief and pain, and yet she was beautiful so beautiful, clothed in golden light that reminded him of happier days. Her skin was warm, and she just held him, his face to her neck and his hands at her waist.

“You’re beautiful,” he told her, words choking. He had so much to tell her - so much to confess - and yet he could barely get out the most generic of compliments. Shepard laughed and touched his face with affectionate fingers.

“You’re beautiful, too, Jimmy.”

He loved it when she called him that.

 

iii.

 

When they returned to Earth, it was dark. The sun had turned its face from them, leaving them in the shroud of a nightmare, the only illumination coming from the spear of light that jettisoned to the Citadel from the centre of London. Its light was stark and terrible; it was an unnatural thing, James growled from between grit teeth, and Ashley only nodded haggardly in agreement. Shepard was nowhere to be seen as they brought down the AA gun; she was lost in a swarm of husks, cutting her way through them and blasting them to pieces when her gun didn’t do the job right. Rather than feeling like the nighttime, it felt more as though the sun had been completely extinguished, leaving them entirely without hope.

“Come home,” he told her, made her promise.

Shepard smiled that same old smile, but it didn’t look the same. She touched his face, kissed him, and told him goodbye in a voice that said she already knew this was the end.

And then she was gone.

There was no sunlight. Only darkness, complete darkness, cut through with the ice of the galaxy’s final push. It was a wave against a cliff, hopeless and doomed, and James knew it as well as anybody else. He lost sight of Shepard, and something within him tore, withering and dying deep in his chest.

 

iv.

 

They were starving.

They were starving and the ship’s water supplies were almost out. Tali and Garrus rarely spoke since the dextro paste ran out, and spent their hours sleeping until the inevitability of their starvation took hold. EDI’s corpse lay in the medical bay on one of the gurneys, covered in a sheet just the same as any organic body, and Joker piloted the ship without eating or drinking or sleeping. They’d lost themselves in the dark expanse of the galaxy; after Shepard had fired the Crucible, they’d set off in a blind flight, and ended up on a planet even the _Normandy’s_ sensors didn’t recognise. And then they set back the way they’d come, through the void of space, feeling about blindly in the wake of the ship’s destroyed sensors and tangled algorithms. Now that EDI no longer existed, the ship was thrown into disarray, and had gone almost entirely dark. But still Joker flew, never speaking, never moving. Nobody was really sure if they would even make it back to Earth; most of them had already accepted they wouldn’t. Their death would be slow and quiet and dark.

Nobody spoke to each other. It was silence in the darkness of the ship, the ambience lighting turned off in order to reserve power, and it felt eerily similar to the brief period of time following Shepard’s death years before.

It was Ashley who took up residence in Shepard’s cabin; she’d lie on Shepard’s bed, still unmade from the night before their assault on Earth, holding some leftover piece of clothing to her face while she pretended to sleep. James would watch her, and sometimes he’d join her, holding Ashley’s warm, shaking body to his as they wept. They’d grown close, Ashley and James, united in their love for Shepard and their shyly emerging love for one another. It was now that love became apparent and infinitely important: they were all they had. Shepard left a gaping hole between them that nothing could fix, but they tried, how they tried.

The darkness was cold and absolute.

 

v.

 

When they first saw Sol again, James was almost blinded by its light.

They had spent so long in darkness, so long in despair, that the sudden brightness of their home was almost too much to bear. Ashley howled in his arms and the entire crew lit up like a string of lights; they were alive again, alight with hope. The _Normandy_ was falling apart at the seams, and yet Joker set her down amidst the ruins of London with little more than a creak and a whisper.

The sun shone.

For the first time since he’d left Earth on that fateful October morning, James saw the daylight again. The city was in ruin, crumbling and falling to pieces, but it lived. It lived, and its people had survived, which was all that mattered. All their sacrifices had been worth it. He couldn’t breathe; he held Ashley tight beneath his arm as she heaved dry sobs, watching the crew collapse into the arms of the waiting Alliance medics. She was crying, crying, calling for Shepard, howling for the both of them, being the sound James couldn’t bring himself to make. He wanted to scream for Shepard, too, to call for his sunlight, because he could _feel_ her here, somewhere. She hadn’t been extinguished. Not yet.

Then she _was_ there, quite suddenly and quite overwhelmingly, and the day bloomed open like an exploding star. Shepard sat in a wheelchair with a colourful quilt thrown across her legs, Miranda Lawson by her side, and her entire left arm replaced by a prosthetic. Her face, James saw, was all stitched up like a patchwork doll; but she was alive, and she blazed with a fire that could never be doused, her smile disfigured and crooked and beautiful.

The sunlight touched her and she shone.


End file.
